Page:Don Quixote (Cervantes, Ormsby) Volume 1.djvu/76

 lxvi and their love of cold conceits and verbal quibbles. These were the besetting sins of the prose of the day, but Cervantes has besides sins of his own to answer for. He was a careless writer at all times, but in "Don Quixote" he is only too often guilty of downright slovenliness. The word is that of his compatriot and stanch admirer Clemencin, or I should not venture to use it, justifiable as it may be in the case of a writer who deals in long sentences staggering down the page on a multiplicity of "ands," or working themselves into tangles of parentheses, sometimes parenthesis within parenthesis; who begins a sentence one way and ends it another; who sends relatives adrift without any antecedent to look to; who mixes up nominatives, verbs, and pronouns in a way that would have driven a Spanish Cobbett frantic. Here is an example of a very common construction in "Don Quixote:" "The host stood staring at him, and entreated with him that he would rise; but he never would until he had to tell him that he granted him the boon he begged of him." Here, as Cobbett would have said, "is perfect confusion and pell-mell," though no doubt the meaning is clear.

Nor are his laxaties of this sort only; his grammar is very often lax, he repeats words and names out of pure heedlessness, and he has a strange propensity to inversion of ideas, and a curious tendency to say the very opposite of what he meant to say. His blind worshippers, with whom it is an axiom that he can do no wrong, make an odd apology for some of these slips. They are only his fun, they say; in which case Cervantes must have written with a prophetic eye to the friends of Mr. Peter Magnus, for assuredly no others of the sons of men would be amused by such means.

But besides these two, there is what we may call Cervantes' own style, that into which he falls naturally when he is not imitating the romances of chivalry, or under any unlucky impulse in the direction of fine-writing. It is almost the exact opposite of the last. It is a simple, unaffected, colloquial style, not indeed a model of correctness, or distinguished by any special grace or elegance, for Cervantes always wrote hastily and carelessly, but a model of clear, terse, vigorous expression. To an English reader, Swift's style will, perhaps, convey the best idea of its character; at the same time, though equally matter-of-fact, it has more vivacity than Swift's.